What's In A Name?

Let me first point out that in the above picture, Will is wearing my favorite teensy outfit (teensy because James wore it approximately 2 times before his obese self outgrew it!) that my friend, Madeline, gifted us with almost three years ago. It is SO teensy and perfect and I was thrilled for it to make another appearance recently! (And Will isn't nearly as large as James was so he's already worn it three times...and tee-teed on it once!)

Second, the "skirt" he has is actually a burp cloth that was made by my sweet friend Lauren (does it confuse y'all when I mention Lauren on here? Like I'm speaking in the third person?) whose family calls ME Sewing Lauren. Nevermind that I haven't ever sewn anything real. I did hem a dress recently, but I'm not sure that a hem on anything counts!

We've gotten three big questions about Mr. William Edward's name since we announced it after his birth.

1. Why did you choose to keep it a secret?

2. Why didn't you just announce it after James spilled the beans?

3. What's the meaning behind it?

We chose to keep his name a secret this time for two big reasons. First, we got a lot of opinions about James' name before he was born (from family, friends, AND strangers!). The opinions seemed to stop once he was born. I really felt like they probably stopped because there was a person attached to the name. Before he was here people felt like they could justify their opinions because we might not be serious about the name until he was born. Second, we didn't announce it because for a long time we didn't know what it was. We had a hard time deciding on his name this time around. We knew absolutely that Edward would be his middle name, but we had no clue what his first name would be. We had a list of 5-10 names and William was always on there, but there were others we were considering as well.

We continued to keep people in the dark about Will's name after James spilled the beans because...we weren't sure that really was his name. I had gone through our list of names with James one day to see if he could even pronounce any of them. For whatever reason, he just took to Will. We never encouraged it at all, he just decided that's what his name would be. He had also toyed with the name George (after Curious George). We knew that George wasn't on our list so we named our Elf of the Shelf George just to get that idea out of his head.

William is a name I have always liked. I mentioned it to Eddie and while he liked it, too, he is very big on the idea of family names. James' name is from Eddie's maternal granddaddy and my mom's family. Because of that, we thought we'd hit Eddie's dad's side of the family and my dad's side of the family. (Sidenote, if you decide to do family names you have to stick with it - so be careful! :) It was harder the second time around than we thought it'd be!) Once James took the name and ran with it we began to get a little nervous. I started naming other names to James and we drilled my dad on names in his family. That was a little bit tough. We could not come up with anything that we liked. Everyone else started to pick up on William. Finally, Dad mentioned that there was a William on his side of the family (his brother is William, too, but there was another William even farther back). Once we realized it was a family name we decided to let James have his way! :) (We like it a lot, too...it was just nice to be able to let James help pick his name {and may save us some therapy later in his life}.)